“Was your aunt one of them?”
“He didn’t tell me, and I don’t know.”
“Have you spoken to your aunt?”
“No.”
“
“But the film shows the women in Group X?”
“Yes. They supposedly relive their abuse in front of the camera.”
“I guess Malik’s killer took it.”
I give Kaiser a thin smile. “I’d say so.”
He glances back toward the NOPD detectives, who are staring angrily at the car. “Goddamn it. Tell me about that motel room, Cat.”
“I didn’t know where Malik was until five minutes before I got here. He gave me a phone number to call. When I arrived, the door was open. I went in and found him in the bathroom. The blood on the wall was fresh. Then I saw the gun in his hand.”
“What if Malik was the killer, and he offed himself because his ‘work’ was done after all? After the sixth victim, I mean?”
I shake my head. “You know better, John. Malik’s work was his film, not murder. Tell me about the sixth victim.”
Kaiser looks back at the motel. Piazza is standing with her detectives again. “His name was Quentin Baptiste. He was an NOPD homicide detective.”
“Yep. It was probably Baptiste who was feeding information to the killer, knowingly or not. That’s one reason Piazza would like to pin that on you.”
“How old was Baptiste?”
“Forty-one.”
“The youngest victim yet. Is Sean at that crime scene?”
“He was on his way there when I left. He’s probably heard about this by now. We need to get you out of here.”
“What about female relatives?”
“What?
“Have you checked out Quentin Baptiste’s female relatives? One of them could have been a patient of Malik’s. One of them could be in Group X. If he was only forty-one, I’d check daughters, step-daughters, and nieces. Also brothers or fathers of those women.”
“I was starting that when we got the tip to come here. Since Baptiste was a cop, it shouldn’t be hard to-” Kaiser’s face tightens.
A dark green Saab screeches to a stop a few yards away from us. As Sean leaps out and races toward the motel, Kaiser lifts a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Richard, get out here
“Is Sean living at home again?” I ask.
Kaiser meets my eyes. “I think so, yeah. Trying to reconcile with his wife.”
“Make sure he knows I’m not hurt.”
“I will.”
The front door of the Crown Vic opens, and a gray-suited FBI agent jumps behind the wheel. As he starts the engine, Sean bursts from room eighteen and scans the parking lot. Our eyes lock. He sprints toward the car, but Kaiser’s driver screeches onto Williams Boulevard before Sean can reach us.
We’re three blocks away from the motel when a revelation hits me like a body blow. “Turn around!”
“That would be a mistake,” Kaiser says firmly. “For both of you.”
“It’s not Sean! It’s the skull. I need to see that skull.”
“Why?”
I try to rein in my excitement. “The teeth in that skull made the bite marks on the victims. I’d bet anything on it.”
“Turn the car around,” Kaiser orders.
Richard gets us back to the Thibodeaux in less than a minute. Sean’s Saab is already gone. Captain Piazza must have made it clear to him that following us could be a catastrophic career move.
Summoned by Kaiser via radio, a female evidence technician walks out to our car carrying the skull in a large Ziploc bag. Kaiser reaches across me, rolls down my window, and takes the skull from the tech. Then he sets it in my lap.
The polished skull stares up at me with the ironic grin I saw in the motel bathtub. The bone has a slightly yellowish color, probably from aging of the varnish someone put on it.
“I need gloves.”
“Give her your gloves,” Kaiser orders the tech.
My heart pounds as I struggle to put on the technician’s latex gloves, which turned inside out when she removed them. Even without opening the skull’s mouth, I can see that its lateral incisors are slightly pegged, as were those that wounded the flesh of our victims. Once the gloves are on, I open the Ziploc and remove the skull.
I’ve held many of these during my career, some clinically spotless like this one, others dredged out of mass graves in Bosnia by a backhoe. The ones like this you see in dentists’ and doctors’ offices. They’re good for patient education, and they lend a certain macabre severity to a medical office.
The jaw opens easily on the springs screwed to the interior surfaces of the zygoma and mandible. Doing bite-mark comparisons can be long, painstaking work, but sometimes it’s a no-brainer. This is one of those times. The maxillary arch of the bite marks at the murder scenes is engraved upon my mind, and the one in this skull matches it tooth for tooth.
“Well?” says Kaiser.
“It’s a perfect match.”
Chapter 43
As we zoom along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain toward the FBI field office, Kaiser speaks on the phone to someone who obviously has a great deal of power. My head is still pounding, the pain focused behind my eyes. The skull is riding up front on the passenger seat, next to our driver.
At last Kaiser hangs up and turns to me. “The chief of police is going batshit because I wouldn’t let Piazza arrest you. Now that I took you away from the scene, he’s calling my boss. It’s going to be a bureaucratic shitstorm.”
“Am I going to be arrested?”
“The field office is task force headquarters. If you’ll remain there a while without making a fuss, that’s your best bet for staying out of jail.”
“Look, my showing up at that motel was just lagniappe for the killer. It was the killer who tipped you where to find the murder weapon and the video equipment, and the same person gave you the motel and the skull. He’s trying to frame Malik. My showing up was just a bonus. If you figured out the suicide was staged, I was right there to blame for staging it. And with my experience, I’d know just how to do it.”
“It plays,” says Kaiser, “but I can think of a scenario that plays equally well.”
“Not your multiple personality fantasy.”
“No. The women in Group X know Malik is killing abusers, and also that he killed an innocent man. One of them is having a crisis of conscience. Like the woman who tried to kill herself, Margaret Lavigne.”
